Elinor Nauen

Promise the weak strength and have the strength of a thousand weak at your bidding.

~ William Carlos Williams, from "Red Eric," In the American Grain

 

I'm more interested in moving forward than parsing how we got here but because it's my main man, WCW, saying it, & a hundred years ago at that (In the American Grain was published in 1925), I'll lay it here. He certainly didn't mean to be congratulating anyone for being strong, but analyzing "weaklings holding together to appear strong" and how hard it is to be alone. 

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight

~ William Carlos Wiliams, from Spring & All

 

Williams! My main man! Want a treatise? We are all his heiresses, right, Alice? No time today to write what's in my heart. The father of us all. 

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls

its spent waters forming the ouline of his back.

 

Say it, no idea but in things

 

a man like a city and a woman like a flower

—who are in love. Two women. Three women.

Innumerable women, each like a flower.

 

     But

only one man—like a city.

 

~ William Carlos Williams, from Paterson

 

I took this photo yesterday at the Great Falls National Park. How is it that I worked nearby for years & never moseyed over here. I was so moved to see the same sight as the cover of Paterson, a book I've been reading constantly for decades. 

 

This post begins a week of Williams or until I run out of pictures that I took yesterday. 

Poetry is a rival government always in opposition to its cruder replicas.

~ William Carlos Williams

 

Is this an impeachment inquiry quote? I dunno, I've just been so in love with Williams lately. I never exactly know what he means but he always inspires me. 

Williams taught the same formal message at each ((college)): that the new poetry, esp. the new American poetry, would have to be "consonant—con-sonant—with our age and range of our physical understanding. It must sound with our age and sound new and vigorously." Alchemist of the word as he was, he was looking  Read More 

We've all absorbed Williams' examples so well that his "I do this, I do that" poems (except it's patients & Elsie & Kathleen & a Negro woman who do this or that) almost no longer demonstrate his startling freshness (although they do!). I remember an acquaintance, burning with indignation, saying "This Is Just to Say"—the famous "plums" poem—was "nothing but  Read More 

What we know of Paradise we learn here, by looking, by vision, by imagination, and both Paradise and the ground underfoot are always beyond the perfect grasp of our arts, as of our sciences. —Wendell Berry, The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford

As with a poem, you can't summarize this book, but I think it fair to say it concerns itself with what Berry calls  Read More 

Noticed that the firehouse on 14th St has a reproduction of the Charles Demuth painting "The Figure 5 in Gold" high up on the east wall. I love that painting; I love the Williams poem "The Great Figure" that inspired the painting; I love how both obvious & private the writing is on the painting: the name BILL at the top, along with "WCW," "Carlos," and "Art Co"; and I love that Williams had so many childhood & college friends who were also artists. It's a sort of collaboration, riffing on your friends' work. Is all inspiration a form of collaboration?

 Read More 

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds all glazed with rain
Someone ate the plums in the fridge
I'm so lonesome I need not explain

David McGimpsey did this mashup the Williams boys, Bill & Hank, who share a birthday today. It's as good as it gets, eh?

My other favorite pair of birthday twins: Sam Cooke & Lord Byron, on January 22.

I'm kind of excited to get birthdays in here, almost 6 months before mine on February 18. I like other people's birthdays almost as much as my own. I like running into someone & finding out what day it is: it's a little gift from them to me. I like that today—and every day—is someone’s birthday.  Read More